If you’re on YouTube, a massive view count or a ton of likes can only go so far. Without any engagement from your viewers, your video feels like a ghost town. Lack of viewer engagement hurts your subscriber rate, and you need to get that fixed. Today, we’ve got five useful tips that will help you boost engagement on all your YouTube videos.
#1 Calls to Action
First and foremost, we’ll go with the easiest and most effective form: the call to action. A call to action is anything that prompts the viewer to do something, like hit like, leave a comment, or subscribe to your channel. This can be you verbally speaking to your audience in the video, or just an annotation (see the pink comment box YouTuber Jenna Marbles uses with the CTA “Subscribe to my channel”). So long as you drop one or two of these in your video at an opportune time, you’ll see engagement increase. A nice trick is to offer some sort of reward to your viewers for engaging. For example, promising to upload a new video when this one receives a certain amount of likes. This is an old technique that is still quite useful today.
#2 Engage with your viewers
This one is especially important for anyone who is just starting out on YouTube. If you’re trying to establish a community on your channel, you need to engage with your audience. As a new channel, you’re lucky to get any comments, so take the time to respond to them. Make your viewers feel welcomed, and they’ll keep coming back when you upload new content.
#3 Strategic upload times
Uploading your content at a specific time can help you increase initial engagement. There’s no magic bullet time for this, so the key is to know who your audience is and where they’re located. Experiment with different upload times. You can also look at when your videos are performing their best, and try uploading at those times.
Generally speaking, uploading a little after noon in the proper time zone is a good idea. That ensures your video is just catching steam when people are getting home from school or work.
#4 Buying engagement
If you don’t have any engagement at all, or you think metrics aren’t matching up, buying engagements can help. Whether you want to load up on likes, views, or comments, all these things can be bought. The best part is, to an average viewer, paid engagements are worth just as much as what you get organically. This can be a good way to give your videos an initial boost, as more people engage because they see others’ engagement. Social proof creates a domino affect – use it to your advantage.
#5 Live streaming
If your niche calls for it, you could take advantage of YouTube’s live streaming service. This allows you to broadcast yourself in real time, and viewers can watch live. A chat box comes along with this, and it’s usually very used, so engagement response is huge. However, not all kinds of video creators will excel with live streaming. Certain niches, such as gaming, will fare better than others with this. Keep testing and improving.
These five tips are helpful in getting you started, but they won’t guarantee success. You need to keep tweaking things and constantly trying to improve to see the best results. The more effort your put into it, the more YouTube engagement you’ll see from your audience. Remember to always optimize your video and keep an eye on your analytics at all times to get a sense of whats working and what isn’t.